Red Thumb Mark Book

I brought this book under the assumption that it would be set in Africa concentrating on the illegal ivory trade. As I was to find out this was not exactly correct. Half of the book was set in America where Elena (main character) was currently residing. What proceeded was a very strange and unusual story. A lot of the time I felt like I was reading something out of a dream. It was disjointed in places and didn't make a lot of sense. The dialogue between Elena and other characters in the book was inane. Once the book eventually moved onto the African continent it was very vague and I found it very hard to grapple with the dreamy pose the author affected. Overall quite disappointed in this book and not really sure of what meaning the author tried to get across.

*****NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER 1975*****

"I've been waiting my whole life to fuck up like this."

The Summer of Love has withered away into the Autumn of Paranoia and the Spring of Delusions. John Converse, a journalist, whose claim to fame is his ability to produce compelling headlines (stories to go with the headlines, well that is where things go haywire), is in Vietnam, but he isn't really sure why he is still there. His room has been tainted by some maniac American who chased lizards along the walls, crushed them, and left the stain of their residual fluids on the paint.

"There were moral objections to house lizards being senselessly butchered by madmen. Everyone felt these things. Everyone must, or the value of human life would decline. It was important that the value of human life not decline."

Heavy things are going down.

He comes up with this rather insane idea to smuggle heroin into the states. With the counter culture dying, LSD and Marijuana are out and heroin is the new beast to chase. "The pellet with the poison's in the chalice from the palace, but the flagon with the dragon has the brew that is true."

Converse hires this guy named Ray Hicks, a merchant marine with a penchant for Nietzsche, martial arts, and Zen, to smuggle the heroin into Southern California. Once there Hicks is supposed to hook up with Converse's wife Marge. Marge is then supposed to turn the heroin over to the distributors.

Marge works in an Adult Theater. "She flashed the mooches' fingers laboring over their damp half-erections, burrowing in the moldy subsoil of their trousers like arachnids on a decomposing log." **SHUDDER**

She has developed a drug habit while John has been gone. It starts out as a monkey, but grows into an gorilla. "Diluted. Deluded. Dilaudid.

Ray is naturally paranoid and believes someone is following him. He is sure that Converse has doubled crossed him. After all he knows that Converse thinks he is...odd. Marge is gliding on the wings of befuddlement and between the two of them they hatch a plan to escape and sell the drugs through other sources.

Bad, bad, bad idea.

"The serpent tempting Eve bore a set of carefully rendered rattles."

And everyone involved is having more and more trouble distinguishing reality especially after Marge and Ray start sampling the product. Dilaudid is out. Heroin is in. The gorilla starts doing pushups.

Converse is trying to explain what has happened to his drug contacts. They are not very happy with him, but what keeps him alive is that they still don't have the product. As John was leaving Vietnam he could tell that the situation there was about to explode in all new ways. It was becoming a different war, but when he gets back to the States he can tell that things have changed there as well. Crooked cops, crooked lawyers are all getting into the drug pipeline business. He exchanges one war for another war.

The new American dream is being able to make one big drug deal.

Converse meets the type of client that heroin is tailor made for. "He sat desiring the girl - a speed-hardened straw-colored junkie stewardess, a spoiled Augustana Lutheran, compounded of airport Muzak and beauty parlor school. Her eyes were fouled with smog and propane spray."

To follow the line of reason of any one of the characters will take corkscrew dexterity. It is a sordid novel. Readers don't like these characters and they aren't supposed to. What you recognize in them that is also in yourself are the very things you like least about yourself. They are weak, greedy, self-centered, and lacking in compassion. They continue to allow themselves to be swept along by events simply because that is easier than swimming for shore. This novel is a time capsule of a period when the last bits of naivety and innocence in America are being exchanged for cynicism and skepticism. It is the dawning of the age of HERE WE ARE NOW, ENTERTAIN US*.


* It took until 1991 for Kurt Cobain to explain to us what was going on.

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